The Attacks Against Immigrants Are Really Attacks Against the Rights of All Americans

January 15, 2018

Every day, the Democratic and Republican party politicians, along with the mass media, are trying to whip up public hysteria against immigrants. This propaganda is part of a general climate of repression and is directed squarely against the American people.

To begin with, immigrants are being blamed for every problem from crime to the government deficit, from unemployment to falling wages. By trying to scapegoat immigrants, the politicians want to divert attention from their own failures and from the growing contradictions of U.S. capitalism. It is not immigrant workers, but the government’s huge hand-outs to the military, to the Wall Street bankers and other big business interests which are bankrupting the public treasury; it is not immigrant workers, but the capitalist class and capitalist system which are laying off workers and unable to guarantee the livelihoods of tens of millions of workers.

It is no coincidence that the Democratic and Republican politicians have resorted to such a backward program at this time. As the all-sided crisis of capitalism deepens, the oppressed minority peoples and immigrants are especially put under the gun. More over, the anti-immigrant and racist propaganda is used to cover over the fact that the government and the capitalist class are attacking the rights of all Americans. The capitalist class, ignoring the demand of the times, refuses to go forward and create a society which guarantees, in practice, equal rights and equal responsibilities for everyone. Rather it seeks to put everything in the country at the disposal of big business and the so-called “free market” and deny that the people have any rights whatsoever.

Furthermore, the entire ideology of anti-immigrant hysteria being pushed by the capitalist politicians stands truth on its head, claiming that the oppressed minorities have all the “advantages” and “privileges” and that these “privileges” are responsible for the worsening conditions of other workers. What a double and triple fraud! The very government which systematically denies the rights of all Americans, which imposes a double yoke of oppression and discrimination on the minority peoples and which is intent on stripping away even the few gains by the people over decades, is blaming the most oppressed victims of the system for oppressing others. This conception is a prescription not only for dividing the people into competing interest groups, but also for condemning the vast majority of the people to intensified exploitation and oppression by transforming rights into privileges or “policy objectives” which may be granted or denied to various sections of the people depending on circumstances.

The root problem is that while various rights are proclaimed on paper, the government deprives the people of the means to guarantee these rights in practice. The Workers Party points to the need for a modern definition of rights in which violations of freedom such as economic inequality are overcome, and in which government is forced to guarantee in practice that everyone living in this country enjoys her or his inalienable rights, including the right to a secure job and stable income, free and comprehensive health care, the best possible education, and so forth.